Jamaica ABM Network Recovers to 91.3% in December as Hurricane Melissa Claims 11 Permanently Damaged Machines

• National ABM network reaches 91.3% operational and 91.6% uptime in December
• Hurricane Melissa permanently destroys 11 machines in Scotia Bank’s fleet
• Hanover parish worst-hit: 78.8% operational and just 62.5% uptime
• Victoria Mutual surges from 67.5% to 94.1% uptime in remarkable single-month recovery
• KMA leads all regions with 99.1% operational performance and 94.3% uptime
• Average recovery time improves to 2.1 hours as technician response strengthens

Two months after Hurricane Melissa swept through Jamaica, the island’s ABM network showed clear signs of recovery in December — national operational performance climbing to 91.3% and system uptime reaching 91.6% — but the storm’s legacy remained visible in permanently damaged infrastructure and unresolved telecommunications outages that continued to hobble western parishes through the Christmas period.

The Bank of Jamaica’s ABM Performance Report for December 2025 records 889 total machines across Jamaica’s banking network, with 812 operational, producing a system-wide operational percentage of 91.3% and uptime of 91.6%. Average recovery time improved to 2.1 hours, a metric that reflects both the responsiveness of bank technician teams during the high-demand Christmas period and the gradual normalisation of field conditions following October’s storm disruption. The headline numbers mark a solid step forward from November’s crisis readings, but the granular parish data reveals that Hurricane Melissa’s damage is not yet fully repaired.

Eleven Machines Permanently Lost to Hurricane Melissa

The December report contains a disclosure that moves Melissa’s impact from the category of temporary disruption into permanent infrastructure loss. Bank of Nova Scotia’s ABM fleet was subject to “completed damage to 11 machines” — language that indicates these units sustained irreparable harm during the October storm and have been written off the operational network. Scotia Bank’s uptime in December stood at 90.3%, influenced by this reduction in effective fleet size and by the continued presence of telecommunications outages in storm-affected areas that left some surviving machines unable to process transactions even when physically undamaged.

The permanent loss of 11 machines represents the most significant single-institution, storm-related infrastructure casualty in the 2025 BOJ data series. For a network as critical as an island’s ABM infrastructure — where each machine in a community may serve hundreds or thousands of customers with no alternative within practical distance — a reduction in fleet size is not simply an accounting matter. It means that communities which depended on those machines for cash access must now travel further, queue longer at surviving units, or manage without convenient ABM coverage until replacements are installed and commissioned. Scotia Bank’s operational percentage of 91.3% in December, while respectable at the national level, masks the localised gaps created by this permanent loss.

Hanover and Trelawny: Hurricane Melissa’s Lingering Grip

The parish-level data makes clear which parts of Jamaica are still living with Melissa’s consequences. Hanover — located in the northwest of the island, directly in the path of the storm’s most severe rainfall and wind — recorded the worst ABM performance in the entire national network in December, with just 78.8% of machines operational and uptime of only 62.5%. Only 10 ABMs serve the parish in total, meaning that any disruption has an outsized effect on access for Hanover’s residents, who have limited banking infrastructure alternatives.

Trelawny, Hanover’s eastern neighbour and similarly a western parish, also continued to show the strain of storm-related disruption: operational percentage at 80.5% and uptime at just 71.4% for its 10-machine network. St Thomas, on the opposite end of the island in the southeast, recorded 87.4% operational and 72.0% uptime — a result that points to a different source of disruption, potentially related to power and telecommunications infrastructure vulnerabilities in that parish that predate the hurricane but were exacerbated by it.

St Catherine, the island’s largest parish by population and home to Spanish Town and Portmore, recorded 83.1% operational performance in December — below the national average and the weakest result for a large-population parish in the current period. St Catherine’s 95 machines represent one of the largest single-parish fleets in Jamaica, and any weakness there affects a significant proportion of the total population dependent on ABM access outside the Kingston metropolitan boundary.

Victoria Mutual: A December Recovery for the Record Books

No institution-level story in the December report is more dramatic than Victoria Mutual Building Society’s recovery. In November 2025, Victoria Mutual had recorded the lowest uptime of any institution across the entire 2025 data series — 67.5% — a reading that represented a severe operational failure during the post-hurricane period. December’s report shows the institution bouncing back to 94.1% uptime, a recovery of 26.6 percentage points in a single month. Operational percentage also recovered strongly, reaching 94.6% in December.

The scale and speed of Victoria Mutual’s recovery is unusual even by the standards of a sector that regularly sees month-to-month fluctuations. It suggests that the November crisis was primarily driven by resolvable issues — telecommunications reconnection, power restoration, or acute technical faults that responded to concentrated remediation effort — rather than the kind of structural equipment damage that requires extended repair timelines. For Victoria Mutual’s customers, who endured a month of severely degraded service during what was already a stressful post-hurricane period, the December recovery will have come as a significant relief.

KMA Leads the Nation at 99.1% Operational

While western and some eastern parishes wrestled with residual storm impacts, Kingston and St Andrew delivered near-perfect ABM performance in December. The 318-machine KMA network achieved 99.1% operational rate and 94.3% uptime — readings that reflect both the density of redundancy in the capital’s infrastructure and the relative protection Kingston received from Melissa’s most damaging effects, which concentrated more heavily in the western and southwestern parishes.

The KMA’s 99.1% operational figure means that virtually every machine in the Kingston and St Andrew network was available for customer use throughout December. With 318 machines, this is the island’s largest single-region fleet and its most consistently reliable. The 94.3% uptime result is slightly lower than the operational percentage, reflecting the inevitable instances where machines experience brief outages during the month that are restored before the next reporting cycle but still register in the uptime calculation. This gap between operational percentage and uptime is normal and healthy in a large fleet; the KMA readings represent best-in-class performance for December 2025.

Strong Performers Across Jamaica’s Parishes

Several parishes delivered notable December performances that deserve recognition alongside the accounts of storm-affected laggards. Westmoreland achieved 97.1% operational — a strong result for a western parish and a sign that recovery in that part of the island was more complete than in Hanover and Trelawny. St Elizabeth recorded 96.3% uptime, the highest uptime figure for any individual parish in December, reflecting the consistent reliability that the south-coast parish has delivered throughout the 2025 series. Manchester reached 94.8% operational and 92.9% uptime, while St James — the parish encompassing Montego Bay and one of Jamaica’s most economically active tourist zones — achieved 94.1% operational and 92.6% uptime, ensuring that the Christmas tourism season was well-served by ABM access.

St Ann, home to Ocho Rios and a substantial tourism economy, recorded 95.3% operational and 82.9% uptime with its 52-machine fleet. The difference between operational percentage and uptime in St Ann is wider than average, suggesting that some machines experienced extended periods of downtime during the month even when technically deployed and available. Portland achieved 95.7% operational and 84.5% uptime — solid readings for a parish with limited overall banking infrastructure.

JMMB Leads the Institution Tables; JN Bank Steps Back

Among individual institutions, JMMB maintained strong performance with 93.2% operational and 90.3% uptime across its 106-machine fleet — the largest single-institution network in the BOJ data. First Global Bank posted 90.1% operational and 95.2% uptime, a solid all-round result. Sagicor Bank, operating a smaller network of 11 machines, achieved 97.3% operational and 100.0% uptime — a perfect uptime reading that, while achieved across a relatively small fleet, reflects genuine service excellence during the Christmas period.

JN Bank’s December reading of 89.5% operational and 86.7% uptime represents a step back from November’s strong 96.2% uptime recovery. The institution, which had experienced a widely-followed operational crisis in September 2025 before recovering strongly in October and November, is showing the kind of month-to-month variability that characterises a network that has been through significant stress. An 86.7% uptime reading is not a crisis — it sits within an acceptable operational range — but it extends the pattern of inconsistency that has defined JN Bank’s 2025 trajectory and suggests that the underlying issues driving those swings have not been fully resolved.

What December’s Recovery Means for Financial Access

The broader picture from December’s ABM report is one of a system that has weathered a significant natural disaster and emerged operationally functional, if not entirely whole. The national 91.3% operational rate and 91.6% uptime are reasonable outcomes for a month that came just ten weeks after one of the most damaging tropical storms in recent Jamaican history. The fact that the network served the Christmas period — when cash demand is at its annual peak — at these performance levels is a testament to the investment that Jamaica’s banking sector has made in resilient infrastructure and rapid recovery capability.

Yet the permanent loss of 11 machines and the continued weakness in Hanover and Trelawny are reminders that resilience has limits. For communities in western Jamaica that depend on a handful of ABMs for all their cash access needs, the machines lost to Hurricane Melissa are not abstractions — they are the difference between financial access and a long drive to the nearest functional unit in a neighbouring community. The question of how quickly these machines are replaced, and whether their replacement is accompanied by investments in communications and power redundancy that would reduce their vulnerability to future storms, will be a defining measure of Jamaica’s banking sector’s commitment to financial inclusion beyond the metropolitan core.

As 2025 closes, the ABM story is ultimately one of recovery in progress — meaningful progress, but incomplete. December 2025 represents a clear improvement over November’s post-hurricane nadir, and the trajectory points toward full normalisation in early 2026. Whether that normalisation includes rebuilding the permanently damaged machines and addressing the infrastructure vulnerabilities exposed by Melissa will determine whether Jamaica enters the next storm season stronger, or arrives at the same inflection point once again.

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